In The News: Home Based Child Daycare Teaches TV

In Black communities, where single parent households are not uncommon, reasonably priced child care is a necessity. Many fiscally mindful parents opt for home based child care as an alternative to more pricey day care centers. Unfortunately, recent reports have uncovered that children who attend home based child care are watching significantly more television than peers enrolled in day care centers. Of day care centers polled, 70% admit to television use during the day, some allowing youngsters to watch as much as two hours of TV daily.

Two hours of television during the day may not seem like a lot, however, when coupled with home television viewing, some children are spending as much as 33% of their waking hours in front of the tube. That's almost 4 times more television than the American Academy of Pediatrics suggest for youngsters.

Early child development and education plays a vital role in long term learning. Early academic encouragement has been found to greatly improve the potential of children. Malik Green speaks of the benefits of early child development in an article for AfrAmnews.com titled Benefits of Early Childhood Brain Stimulation and why it should be Implemented in every African American Community. The article discusses the Abecedarian Project, an educational research program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has found that engaging young children in age appropriate educational games that emphasize cognition and language, has staggering beneficial effects on participants. Children who participated in the study were found to have higher IQs and performed better on achievement tests. The study also found that:

• Children who received the intervention scored 1.8 grades years higher in reading and math as young adults.
• Thirty-six percent of these children were more likely to attend a four-year college, compared to only 14 percent of the children who did not receive intervention.
  
• Twenty-six percent of the children who received intervention were less likely to have had their first child at age 18 or younger, compared to forty-five percent of the children who didn’t received intervention.
• Forty-seven percent of the intervention children were more likely to have a skilled job versus only twenty-seven of the children who did not receive intervention. (Read More)

With statistic such as these, the importance of proper child care is evident. Parents spending their hard earned dollars on early child care need to seek programs that aid in child development and foster a thirst for learning.

Make sure you're getting your money's worth - two hours of television a day isn't what you're paying for!

Properly educating the next genertion IS activism.